Friday, March 11th, 2011 More than Comfort Women: Female Factory Labor among Colonial Koreans during the Pacific War

Description

My discussion on women’s work in wartime Korea (1937-1945) has several aims. First, it narrates some of the contributions of Korean women to industrial production in the Japanese wartime empire. Second, by outlining some of the central policies and programs that brought industry and labor under the rubric of “imperial mobilization,” I furnish examples of the scope of the war’s social effects. Third, I elaborate on some of the ways in which female labor recruitment was performed under the auspices of student campaigns in its early years. Still facing a labor shortage in 1943, officials decided to recruit women explicitly for heavy industry and aimed for greater enlistment of women in the colonies. Describing how the Women’s Labor Volunteer Corps mobilized trainable female workers for all types of war-related industries is the fourth objective of this study. Fifth, I focus on the oral histories of female volunteers employed in the machine and machine tools sectors, specifically, the operatives of the Fujikoshi steel factory in Toyama, Japan, to offer alternative renderings of women in wartime Korea. In so doing, I hope to expose some of the lesser known effects of Japan’s total war in Korea.

Janice C. H. Kim is an associate professor of History at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Born in Seoul and raised in the Washington D.C. Area, Dr. Kim has a B.A. And M.A. In History from The Johns Hopkins University (1996) and a M.A. In East Asian Studies (1997) and Ph.D. In History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, U.K. (2001). Among her published articles and book chapters are: “Living in Flight: Civilian Displacement, Suffering, and Relief during the Korean War, 1945-1953,” Sahak yŏn’gu [The Review of Korean History], No. 100 (December 2010), 285-329, “The Pacific War and Working Women in Late-Colonial Korea,” Signs 33:1 (Fall 2007), 81-104, “The Varieties of Women’s Wage Work in Colonial Korea,” The Review of Korean Studies, 10:3 (June 2007), 119-146, and “Processes of Feminine Power: Shamans in Central Korea,” in Keith Howard, ed., Korean Shamanism: Revivals, Survivals and Change, (Seoul: The Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, 1998), 113-133. Her book, To Live to Work: Factory Women in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2009) concerns the popular expansion of gender, labor and political consciousness among working women in colonial Korea. In this work she examines Japanese imperialism and the interplays between domestic events and the broader social and economic changes brought on by the First World War, the Depression and the Pacific War. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled, “Between Mountains: Refugee Life during the Korean War,” which explores the social and economic history of refugees and civilian livelihood during and after the Korean War. Plans for future research include a study of affection, labor and the moral economy, in developing South Korea, from the 1960s to the 1980s. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies, Northeast Asia Council, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the British Council. She recently held a Korea Foundation Field Research Fellowship (2010) and holds a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant (2010-2013).